...The Dong Nai Fruit Heist

A friend and former business school classmate from Saigon owns a small farm in the town of L. T., about a 90 minute drive from the city, in Dong Nai province. I have visited the farm over the years to stay at the traditional North-highland stilt-house she built there, known as a "nha san," and to visit the family that lives on the farm and works the land. So when I received a call from my old classmate a few weeks ago inviting me to head out to the house on a day trip, my answer was a very quick "yes."

The wooden nha san stands out here in the south, a land of low, one-story houses made from a less exotic material - known locally as xi mang, and in English as cement. The house is raised up on stilts, to keep the wild animals that (used to) prowl the forest at a safe distance, and was also the type of traditional house that Ho Chi Minh lived in. There are many things to see on the farm, depending on the time of year: the lotus pond in various stages of life - budding, blossoming, blooming; the fields of rice just before harvest, a deep green; corn, bitter melon and other crops; and beyond these a small muddy river spanned by a rickety rope bridge; and a long thicket of banana trees along the river.

We arrive to the warm smiles of the farmer, Mr. Q., who along with his wife, and two young boys, Tuan and Tu live in a little (cement) house on a corner of the property. I know the family a bit from past visits, and they have always been politely curious about me. Our conversations are simple: I ask what the difference is between rice in the field (lua) rice after harvest (gao) and cooked rice (com). What are the names of some of the plants and birds around the place? What time do the boys go to school? How are rice prices these days? And they typically ask me the same question: Could I explain again why I am 47 and have never been married?

Mr. Q. prepares tea and drops a bunch of large, flourescent choum choum (rambutan, see photo) on the table for us to nibble on. For his son Tu, Mr. Q has managed to pluck a bees nest ripe with honey from a tree, and Tu is chomping away on it, as soon we all are. (See photo). It tastes like the smell of the countryside here at night. Mr. Q. is of a different breed than us neurotic, haywire city folk: placid, good-humored, and humble. For one, as far as I can tell he never stops smiling. His skin is a deep brown, and his arms look like the arms of a man who works his fields from - you guessed it - sun up to sun down. If I spend the night here, I often see him walking smoothly and peacefully along the narrow footpaths, past the stilt house, back to his house, only a trace of light remaining along the horizon. I believe he is deeply connected to the land in a kind of innocent and knowing and wise way.

We are a group of four, and so Mr. Q's wife has been busy in their kitchen preparing a lunch of boiled chicken, fried chicken, fried fish, rice, vegetable soup, and stuffed bitter melon (kho qua, which means in Vietnamese "crossing past the difficult in life"). The preponderance of chicken on the menu might explain why the two-legged creatures - skinny and little - scattered rapidly in ten directions when our car pulled up in the driveway. There used to be two oxen here as well, tended to by the boys, but they were sold to help pay for the boys' school fees.

After lunch, we read and sleep our way through the midday heat storm, but are soon walking down the footpath to visit the grove of choum choum. Tu has joined us, so we are five walking along the low dikes skirting square plots of land blocked out in the countryside here like a checkerboard. We slip through a stand of brush and out into a kind of hidden orchard, where the choum choum trees grow, along with lime and banana. Mr. Q. is plucking the prickly fruit from the trees, when a pod of very large red ants drops out of the tree and onto his back. It slows him down little. He simply takes off his shirt, and is quickly scaling a banana tree, and, like a Shaolin monk in a Chinese martial arts movie, seems to leap-float from branch to branch, heading higher and higher, his eyes set on a cluster of bananas at the top of a nearby tree. After some tugging, wrenching, twisting, the banana bunch drops down on the ground with a thud, a majestic pile of bananas (a small portion of which kept my potassium high for the entire week to follow). The stem of the hand is covered with a clear, sugary liquid, which I find out to be quite sticky when I try to pick it up.

We walk back to the house with branches of the rambutan tree (covered with the purplish yellow fruit) and a big load of bananas. Somehow, during the course of the day, we and others have also gathered a harvest of many kinds of local crops: not only choum choum and banana, but also jackfruit, as well as the dreaded and smelly durian, birds of paradise flowers (or as a local friend still working on her English botany says: "paradise birds"), grapefruit (known here as pomelo), and lychee. We pile the haul into the back of the old black Mercedes and head back to the big city with a week's worth of fruit.